


just to feel what it's like to pretend

by elliptical



Series: unbecoming jordan hennessy [4]
Category: Dreamer Trilogy - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dubious Consent, Emotional Manipulation, Everything is awful, F/M, Gen, Hennessy Is Her Own Content Warning, Manipulative Relationship, Older Man/Underage Partner, Suicide, canonical suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:47:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28058664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: She offered no remorse.  She didn’t even seem to think she’d done anything wrong.  She told Farrah the news with the tone of a parent scolding a child for spilling juice on the carpet, as ifFarrahwas the sinner here.“I just hope,” Hennessy finished, redoing her lipstick in the vanity mirror, “that you learn something from all this.”
Series: unbecoming jordan hennessy [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2052732
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	just to feel what it's like to pretend

Farrah was a conscious sacrifice.

She woke surrounded by too many bodies. The press of murmuring individuals disoriented her, and her first breath was a shuddered whimper. “Back up, back up, give them both some air,” snapped June, though Farrah only learned the name afterward. It was Jordan who gently disentangled her from Hennessy’s unprotesting arms, as Madox laughed and stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door.

Farrah didn’t know the names, but she learned about the sacrifice almost immediately. Her ignorance lasted through the blessed few moments that Hennessy couldn’t move. During the lull, Jordan held her, shushing her softly, and Farrah clung to the girl’s shirt with the wide-eyed anxiety of a cornered doe. 

The peace couldn’t last, of course. Hennessy shuddered once, hard, and coughed. Then she curled into a tiny ball, expending visible energy to do so, and cradled her head in her hands.

She whispered, “I’m sorry.”

So Farrah knew. 

The details filled in as the other girls explained their shared curse: She had been given life only because the alternative was worse. She was a placeholder, an afterthought, an anonymous face in a lineup. Most importantly, she’d been damned so that Hennessy could save herself. Maybe so that Hennessy could save the others, too, but Farrah doubted the nobility of the cause.

Alba lived and died in the blink of an eye. She was nothing, a more forgettable nothing than even Farrah herself. The girls wouldn’t let Farrah help bury the body. Too fragile, they murmured amongst themselves, too scattered, too easily frightened. Maybe they were right. Farrah possessed none of Hennessy’s survivalism or Jordan’s optimism or June’s pragmatism or Madox’s take-no-shit-ism. She was an afterthought, adrift. The unhappiness clung to her like ink that just wouldn’t wash off, a stain with palpable weight.

Hennessy got emancipated. They all escaped together, a shitty little quintet of shitty little girls. They disappeared. Hennessy was seventeen, which meant the rest of them were too. Signing an apartment lease was a concept fraught with potential disaster, and Hennessy didn’t want a normal life anyway, and Hennessy was the dying girl, so no one ever asked what the rest of them wanted, and Farrah wouldn’t have known how to respond if they did. 

It was amidst all this turbulence and chaos and change that she met him.

His name was Peter. She stumbled into him in a coffeeshop, that most cliche of clandestine meetings. He was beautiful - from the moment she first saw him he was beautiful, his green eyes creased with laughter and his smile the gentlest she’d ever seen. She apologized, flushing, and he steadied her arm, and he offered to buy her a coffee.

That was that.

(None of the others shared her opinion on his looks, when she showed them his Facebook profile. That was all right. “You have to see him in person,” Farrah protested, but she didn’t really want the girls to see him. She didn’t want to share. The lack of competition eased her breathing. When Brooklyn arrived a month later, she agreed that he was in fact “smokin’,” and that was all the vindication Farrah would ever need.)

He called her “baby girl” and was unruffled by her youth, not even when Farrah drunkenly confessed her true age. The line between seventeen and eighteen was a thin one, after all, one that Farrah would cross in a few months. It made no sense to deprive themselves of what little pleasure they could snatch in the meantime. Life was short. And they were both miserable, in their own ways, each finding the other in their time of need.

Farrah was well-spoken, smarter and more mature than most girls her age. Peter often marveled about this. She’d ask him to explain a literature reference or a physics theorem, and his eyes would light with pleasure. “I always forget you aren’t a college graduate, Hennessy,” he’d tell her with his soft laugh, and she’d melt with her own private happiness. 

He didn’t know her real name, of course, but he knew _her._ He knew who she was, who she might become. She felt like a real person around him. Realer than Hennessy or Madox or even Jordan. She sometimes wished they could see what their doe-eyed scaredycat nothing-girl had become, if only so they’d believe in her. She _bloomed_. 

If Peter met the others, he would have no trouble separating Farrah from the real Hennessy.

He loved Shakespeare. Properly loved it, too, unlike the pretentious academics who only read Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet to pay lip service. He’d studied the bard in school years ago, gotten himself a degree. His wife had been in one of his playwriting workshops. They’d read their pieces together, their energy kinetic, and the rest was history.

He always looked so sad when he talked about his wife. Many memories even sounded _happy_ in their telling, but perhaps the joy worsened the pain. He’d been young, he explained, too young to realize what a commitment he was making. The marriage had been a mistake. He needed to experience more of life’s offerings before he understood who he was. _I lost the chance to live the life I wanted to,_ he said. _If I could go back and do it again..._

Farrah’s heart broke for him. She’d lost so many of her own chances, brought into this awful world with a shared face and a false name and a sadness that never lifted. Maybe the universe had placed them together on purpose. Maybe they were meant to be each other’s new beginning.

They rented hotel rooms, at first. Peter was well-off, but only because he’d never been allowed to chase his true dream of stage direction. His wife had wanted other things and refused to compromise. _I don’t think she knew how much it meant to me,_ Peter murmured, the familiar unhappiness reappearing. His wife wanted a traditional life. She wanted money, and a big house, and a church group, and space for a family. Then instead of having a baby like they’d planned, she lost herself to a wine bottle every time her husband’s work hours kept him away. _As if she didn’t want this,_ Peter sighed, and Farrah peppered kisses all over his cheekbones to erase the frown.

He’d become some kind of corporate executive. _Don’t you need a - a business degree or some shit?_ Farrah had asked, the profanity playful and teasing, _look I’m funny I’m not like the crass girls my age_. He’d given her that soul-blazing smile and said, _Not if you play your cards right._

So he could afford five-star hotels. He could pay for the staff’s discretion. He could order lobster and molten lava cake for them to share, tucked together in the bed, legs twined below the blankets, laughing at the pay-per-view on the television.

Farrah liked the luxury. Of course she did. She was enough like Hennessy to appreciate attention. But even so, there was an ongoing fantasy in her head: one where Peter quit his shitty job and left his shitty wife and carried her away from this city. They’d sleep together on a bare mattress in a near-empty apartment in New York, and the pipes would rattle, and they’d eat ninety-nine cent ramen the same way they feasted on lobster, and their neighbors would fuck too loud next door, and so they’d do the same in revenge. Peter would return to the theater scene, and Farrah would support him, and they’d be happy. Destitute, and tired, and unnoticed in the always-rushing New York crowd, but happy.

He texted her one afternoon just after she’d gotten out of the shower. _Last night was incredible,_ the screen read, in the impeccable grammar that Peter always used, because he believed chatspeak was for the illiterate. _I had no IDEA about this side of you! You should let it loose more often, love. This weekend, maybe? I have ideas._

The only problem, of course, was that Farrah hadn’t seen him last night.

_What do you mean?_ she replied.

He texted some of the ideas. Farrah had to sit down, suddenly, because the mental images made her lightheaded in ways that might have been good or bad.

_No, what about last night?_

He texted her a photo. 

Nothing about the image was illegal, because her eighteenth birthday had been one month prior. It was, however, the sort of photo that _would_ have been illegal if the subject was underage. The camera showed Peter posed in the lavish bed of another lavish hotel room, and a smirking girl with Farrah’s face draped around him like a feather boa.

Of course, the girl wasn’t Farrah.

Of course, Peter didn’t seem to know that.

Farrah confronted Brooklyn first. It was a sensible suspicion; Brooklyn was the only one who’d expressed any real attraction to the man, and she was new enough not to understand the score, and she was such a slutty party girl that she wouldn’t understand Farrah’s possessiveness. After all, the other girls had no qualms about sharing their boyfriends.

But Brooklyn’s bewildered hurt came through genuinely enough to convince Farrah. Party girl or not, she bore no guilt.

Farrah intended to interrogate the others. But the need for further investigation vanished when Hennessy confessed.

She offered no remorse. She didn’t even seem to think she’d done anything wrong. She told Farrah the news with the tone of a parent scolding a child for spilling juice on the carpet, as if _Farrah_ was the sinner here.

“I just hope,” Hennessy finished, redoing her lipstick in the vanity mirror, “that you learn something from all this.”

Farrah’s voice was brittle, breakable. “Learn what.”

“Not to think you’re hot shit just because some middle-aged never-was puts his hands between your legs.” 

Now Hennessy did meet her eyes through the glass. She was not the girl who had apologized for bringing Farrah into the world years before. Farrah hadn’t been paying enough attention, before, but she saw it now: the cruel curve to Hennessy’s mouth, the vindictive satisfaction in her eyes, the predatory glint of her teeth.

Farrah’s hands began to shake. Frogs in boiling water, the lot of them, and the others would never believe her when she tried to explain-

“He doesn’t give a fuck about you,” Hennessy continued. “You stupid little bitch. He likes that you’re a warm body who makes him feel _special_ while he fucks you in whatever holes he wants. A vapid bimbo dumb enough to believe in love. Don’t fucking flatter yourself. You don’t mean shit to him. You’ve fucking _dissolved_ for him. Computer awaiting input. Do you think your Prince Charming’s gonna whisk you away to a fairytale castle? You gotta make your own way in this shithole of a world if you want to get anywhere. You should be smarter than this. You’re _me._ ” She laughed. “He liked me better, anyway.”

Farrah turned around and left.

She walked out of the room, down the stairs, out of the house, over the driveway. Hennessy didn’t pursue her, and she didn’t cross any of the others. Good.

She went straight to Peter. She showed up at his residential address, which was the biggest mistake; his wife was home. It was only by chance that he answered the doorbell. Farrah noted the mixture of anger and panic on his face, and she longed to kiss the creases away like she always did, but this time she held herself back. She’d made him nervous enough already.

Peter rushed her to his car like he was protecting a notorious criminal from prying reporters, and he drove to a McDonald’s parking lot just five minutes away, and he killed the engine. “What the _hell,_ Hennessy?”

Farrah poured it all out: her need to escape, her commitment to him, her fantasy about a new life in New York. The way she’d do anything to make him happy, the way she’d cross boundaries his wife never would. She stopped short of telling him about Hennessy and the others, but only because the information placed her at a disadvantage. Peter had liked Hennessy so much. Farrah needed to be her if she wanted to keep him.

“Baby girl, no, it can’t be like that,” he said softly, and she protested. _Why?_ Why couldn’t it? Why couldn’t they just throw everything away and escape? Why didn’t he care that they were soulmates? Why was he being such a _coward?_

That made him angry. It was too far, she knew, but her attempts to backtrack met with more fury. Farrah didn’t hear all of the words that he said. The phrase “crazy bitch” featured at least once. Peter’s tone needled more clearly than the language: Hennessy’s assessment was correct. He was never going to risk his comfortable life for her. He was never going to spend forever with her. He was never going to offer stability, support, a shoulder to cry on. No one ever was. She was Hennessy’s shadow, and she’d wasted all her potential on a man who didn’t want to love her back, and she couldn’t pick up the shattered pieces, because she’d never been whole in the first place. Never would be whole.

Of course. Of course.

It was all right. 

She stepped out of the car and called herself an Uber, closing her eyes, breathing out. It was all right. It was fine. It was fine. It was fine. She’d be fine.

She knew where June kept the guns.


End file.
